Tag #137602 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

My Romanian teacher, Octavian Siraru, was a very intelligent man who was a good friend and an admirer of Goga, the prime minister. While my Mexican identity held up I didn’t have any problems with Mr. Siraru, but that wasn’t true afterwards. Once we had the task to write something and, being an enterprising but naïve child, I decided to write a four-to-six line poem in Romanian about Romania, expressing how in Romania the trees are blooming and the birds are singing and something else along those lines. Mr. Siraru felt so insulted that he lost his temper and he hit me in the face. He was shouting at me in a husky voice in front of the whole class asking where I got my courage to do such a thing. He said, ‘Limba noastra curata …, vii tu, cine ti-a dat voie sa faci aceasta?’ [Our pure language…, how dare you, who allowed you to do something like this?] There was nothing I could say to him because I didn’t speak Romanian well enough yet.